Last updated: 4 October 2026
By Tristan · Arts, exhibitions and creative culture
This is an opinion piece. Views expressed are the author's own and do not constitute professional advice.
Saunas, subway cars and a lot of skin in Mayfair
Louis Fratino at Zwirner is the American painter's first solo show in London, and his first with the gallery since it began representing him. I went on a Saturday afternoon in early October to see fifteen new paintings by a painter who is very open about who he borrows from.
Cool Factor: 4/5
Louis Fratino at Zwirner: what's on
The showThe exhibition is called Prose, and it fills David Zwirner's London gallery at 24 Grafton Street with fifteen oil paintings, all made in 2026. They range from Chrissie, a portrait just 12⅛ x 9½ inches (30.8 x 24.1cm), to Jasmine, a garden scene 78¼ x 118⅛ inches (198.8 x 300cm). In between there are nudes, a sauna, two New York subway scenes, a café, two still lifes, a seascape and a self-portrait.
According to David Zwirner, the show widens Fratino's range to look at beauty in public life as well as private life. In practice, that means the bedroom and the bathroom now share the walls with crowds: commuters, café regulars and families eating outdoors.
Louis Fratino at Zwirner runs from 18 September to 31 October 2026, and entry is free.
Who is Louis Fratino?
The painterFratino was born in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1993 and lives in New York. He studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, graduating in 2015, then won a Fulbright to paint in Berlin. Since then, he has shown with Sikkema Malloy Jenkins in New York and Galerie Neu in Berlin, and both still represent him alongside Zwirner.
The bigger moments came quickly. In 2024 he hung in the Central Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, and the same year he had a solo show at the Centro Pecci in Prato. Earlier this year, the Baltimore Museum of Art paired him with Matisse in Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again, which closed on 6 September, as BmoreArt reported. His work is in the collections of MoMA, the Met, the Whitney and the British Museum.
Then, in February 2026, David Zwirner announced it now represents him. Zwirner himself said: "His sensual and erotic paintings are impossible to ignore." This London show is the first result of that deal, and it opened a month before Frieze week, when the art world descends on the capital.
Collisions: Fratino and art history
The borrowingFratino doesn't hide his sources. In fact, he builds the work around them. As he told Frieze: "I try to set up collisions between things in order to uncover newness." He also asked the question this whole show is trying to answer: "How do I create something using a familiar subject or genre when it can seem, at first, like everything has already been said and done?"
For this show, two of those collisions are named outright. The first is with Edward Burra, the British painter from Sussex. "One of the first works I completed for my new show," Fratino told Frieze, "is inspired by Edward Burra's The Torturers." Burra's painting, from around 1935, is full of machinery and masked figures. In Fratino's version, "they're on a subway platform". He calls Burra "a bad queer" who "sympathized with Franco", and he's pleased with the result: "My Burra-inspired painting is weird, which is what I'm after." That painting is Summer in the city, 62 x 54 inches (157.5 x 137.2cm). A young man in a white vest stands square to the viewer, gripping a furled umbrella. Beside him, a couple wrapped around each other lead a line of passengers along the platform edge, with small orange shapes scattered at their feet. On the left, a staircase glows orange, with a figure and a child in a pushchair on the steps. On the right, the tunnel curves off into the dark. Fratino has form with Burra, too. Writing for Tate Etc during Tate Britain's 2025 Burra show, he praised the way Burra "invests as much in the sculptural hand turning on the coffee machine as he does in the weird rooster shapes sitting above it". Despite this, it felt like a weak opener for this show, too wedded to its sources, more akin to late 80s British painting.
The second collision is with F.N. Souza, which I'll come to at the self-portrait. Beyond the named pair, Fratino's wider list is long. He told BOMB that he loves Matisse but finds "his grace and his consummate elegance to be almost chilly". He also loves painters such as "Bhupen Khakhar, [...] Otto Dix, or Candido Portinari". On The Art Newspaper's A brush with... podcast, he also talks about Winifred Nicholson, the British painter best known for her flower pieces.
Most tellingly, he told BOMB: "I suppose I am not that interested in 'my own expression' but rather in my ability to commune with many human expressions by borrowing and consuming heavily from all that I have seen and felt." That line matters later, when I get to what didn't work for me.
First impressions: arriving at Grafton Street
I got to Grafton Street mid-afternoon on Saturday 3 October with my friend Denise. There was a steady flow of visitors, and we were welcomed warmly by the staff.
The gallery's installation views show a spacious hang across a run of white rooms with pale wooden floors, mostly two or three paintings to a room. Prose faces you early on, near Ale and the small Snowdrops and hellebores. The subway car gets a room to itself, next to a tall window.
Stop one: a boy reading, after Corot
Louis Fratino, Ale in his mom's bedroom (after Corot), 2026. Photo: CoolCuration.
First up at Louis Fratino at Zwirner was Ale in his mom's bedroom (after Corot), 37¾ x 26¼ inches (95.9 x 66.7cm). A young man in a red shirt sits on the edge of a bed, head down over a small book. The title points straight at Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, the 19th-century French painter. Meanwhile, the room around Ale is all dusty greens and greys, so the shirt does the work.
Up close, the paint is thick and crusty. The red is laid on in short dragged strokes, and the buttons are little raised blobs. Fratino told Frieze that "the material is like a caress or a kiss".
Stop two: Jasmine and the cats
Detail of Louis Fratino, Jasmine, 2026. Photo: CoolCuration.
Next came the biggest painting in the show. Jasmine, 78¼ x 118⅛ inches (198.8 x 300cm), is a family lunch outdoors, beside a white farmhouse under a wall of jasmine. A man holds a baby in a wicker chair, and a woman cradles another child behind him. Further back, a boy in a red T-shirt wanders off down a dirt track. Meanwhile, a goose noses around the plastic garden chairs.
I went in close on the cats. A tabby and white kitten lies curled in its own wicker chair, painted in thick white and grey dabs. Below it, a dark tortoiseshell slinks past with its back arched.
Stop three: The sauna
Louis Fratino, The sauna, 2026. Photo: CoolCuration.
Then The sauna, 44 x 50⅛ inches (111.8 x 127.3cm), painted almost entirely in burnt orange. Seven nude men sit, slump and sprawl across wooden benches. One lies flat along the top tier with his knees up, while a small round lamp glows above them like a sun. Most have their eyes closed or their heads down.
This is Fratino working on one of the genres he names himself. "Take the male nude, for instance," he told Frieze. "I'm curious about what happens to our understanding of it when you position it next to another subject."
"I try to set up collisions between things in order to uncover newness." Louis Fratino
Stop four: Frioul, then the self-portrait after Souza
Louis Fratino, Frioul, 2026. Photo: CoolCuration.
Sharing a corner with the sauna is Frioul, 60 x 56 inches (152.4 x 142.2cm), a much quieter picture. A figure, bare to the waist, leans over the white rail of a boat, looking down into dark water. Behind them, a band of low islands sits under a heavy dusk sky.
Louis Fratino, Self-portrait in studio (after F.N. Souza), 2026. Photo: CoolCuration.
After that I reached Self-portrait in studio (after F.N. Souza), 56 x 34 inches (142.2 x 86.4cm). Fratino stands naked in his studio, one arm raised to the wall and a brush in the other hand. Drawings lie on the floor and hang pinned behind him, and a vase of flowers sits in the window. His skin is a fierce orange, scratched through with yellow and red.
Francis Newton Souza was born in Goa in 1924 and co-founded the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay. He then moved to London in 1949, according to Britannica. For Fratino, the point is Picasso. "I'm interested in how Indian modernism, like British modernism, digested Pablo Picasso," he told Frieze. He adds that a conventional reading "might frame Souza as 'subordinate'" to Picasso, and that's the framing he wants to push against.
Stop five: Chrissie and The subway car
Louis Fratino, Chrissie, 2026. Photo: CoolCuration.
After that, things got much smaller. Chrissie, 12⅛ x 9½ inches (30.8 x 24.1cm), is the smallest painting in the show: a fair-haired woman with pale blue eyes, chin propped on her hand, in a striped top. Even at this size, the paint is piled high.
Louis Fratino, The subway car, 2026. Photo: CoolCuration.
Right after came the opposite. The subway car, 80 x 48⅛ inches (203.2 x 122.2cm), is a packed New York carriage seen from above. At its centre, a man in a yellow hoodie hangs from a strap with his phone in his hand. Around him, a crowd of commuters read, scroll, doze or stare into space, and a parent holds a small child.
This is the public-life side of the show that the gallery's press text describes. Fratino told Frieze that the subway gives him "the heightened energy of the crowds brushing up against machinery", and the carriage bends around its passengers to match.
Back to the first room: Prose
The last painting I spent time with was the one the show is named after, back near the start. Prose, 60 x 45 inches (152.4 x 114.3cm), shows two nude men on a bright orange throw. One lies upside down with his legs in the air while the other holds him. The cover image at the top of this page is a detail of it. The full painting is sexually explicit, so you'll need to see it in person or on the exhibition checklist.
The paint is chalky and dry, and the hair is drawn in tiny curls, almost like etching. Fratino told Frieze he's "trying to push and pull what the true erotic is" inside his work, and Prose is the most direct example in the show.
What didn't work: a British view
The critiqueFrom a UK art-historical angle, it feels like a lot of cribbing from John Craxton, meets Lucian Freud, meets Eric Ravilious, in some kind of Bloomsbury whimsy. Which is fine, because he's open about it. But it doesn't feel new.
Those names will be familiar to anyone who knows British 20th-century painting. Craxton spent much of his life in Greece, painting sailors, shepherds and the sea. Freud made paint feel like flesh. Ravilious turned ordinary rooms and English landscapes into crisp pattern. And the Bloomsbury painters, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell above all, built a whole look out of domestic life, lunches in the garden and nudes in the studio.
Craxton's Head of a Cretan Sailor (1946), now in the London Borough of Camden Art Collection, shows a young man he met in a taverna on Poros, dancing the zeibekiko "in his white uniform like a seagull", according to the exhibition text quoted by Art Blart. The week before Zwirner, we saw his pastel and Conté crayon drawing Man Drinking Ouzo, from the early 1980s, at Osborne Samuel during British Art Fair, priced at £30,000. It's in our British Art Fair review.
Freud's Girl with a Kitten (1947), at Tate Britain, is a tight, close-up portrait of a young woman holding a kitten. Ravilious painted Tea at Furlongs in 1939 at Peggy Angus's cottage below the South Downs in Sussex, and it now belongs to the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden. Duncan Grant's Bathing (1911), also at Tate Britain, shows nude men swimming in the Serpentine and was painted for a student dining hall at Borough Polytechnic.
There's an irony here. Fratino says himself that British modernism, like Indian modernism, "digested Pablo Picasso". A century later, he's digesting the same Picasso and Matisse, so it's no surprise the paintings land on ground British painters already covered. He told BOMB he isn't that interested in "my own expression", and on the evidence of these walls, that's a fair description.
There's also a structural limit. Louis Fratino at Zwirner is a gallery show of new work, all from one year, so you don't get the earlier pastels, the etchings or the pictures that made his name.
Is Louis Fratino at Zwirner worth it?
It costs nothing to walk in, which makes the sums easy for visitors. The paintings themselves are another matter. I overheard that prices run from $75,000 to $200,000.
That's serious money for a painter in his early thirties, though his work is already in MoMA and the British Museum. For most visitors, the useful comparison is time. You can see Louis Fratino at Zwirner in half an hour, then walk to the other Mayfair galleries nearby. Our Frieze London guide covers the wider week, and our Christo review at Gagosian is another Mayfair show we've written up.
Practical information
Louis Fratino at Zwirner, titled Prose, is at David Zwirner, 24 Grafton Street, London W1S 4EZ, until 31 October 2026. According to the gallery's London page, it's open from 10am to 6pm on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. On Thursday it closes earlier, at 4.45pm. It's closed on Sundays and Mondays. Entry is free and there's no need to book.
Green Park is the closest Tube station, a few minutes' walk away. For access questions, call the gallery on 020 3538 3165 or email [email protected] before you go. Frieze London and Frieze Masters run in Regent's Park from 14 to 18 October 2026, according to The Royal Parks, so expect Mayfair galleries to be busier that week.
The show includes explicit nudity throughout, so bear that in mind if you're bringing children.
Cover image: Louis Fratino, Prose (detail), 2026. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
The verdict
Cool Factor
★★★★☆
4 out of 5
Louis Fratino at Zwirner is a properly impressive first London show: fifteen new paintings, free to see, by a painter who knows exactly who he's borrowing from.
Overall, a 4/5 Stone cold. It stops short of Ice cold because so much of it feels like British painting I've seen before, from Craxton to Freud to Bloomsbury. Louis Fratino at Zwirner is free and closes on 31 October, so go before then.
Louis Fratino at Zwirner: common questions
Is the Louis Fratino exhibition at Zwirner worth seeing?
Yes. I gave it four out of five. It's fifteen new paintings, and entry is free, though fans of British art may find a lot of it familiar.
How much does it cost to see Louis Fratino at David Zwirner London?
Nothing. Entry is free and you don't need to book. The paintings themselves sell for between $75,000 and $200,000.
When does Louis Fratino: Prose close?
The show runs until Saturday 31 October 2026. The gallery is closed on Sundays and Mondays.
Who influenced Louis Fratino?
Picasso and Matisse above all. This show also names Edward Burra and F.N. Souza, and in interviews he has talked about Bhupen Khakhar, Otto Dix, Candido Portinari and Winifred Nicholson.
Is the exhibition suitable for children?
Several paintings show male nudity, and one, Prose, is sexually explicit. Decide for yourself, but it's not a family show.
Who is Louis Fratino?
He's an American painter, born in Maryland in 1993 and based in New York, known for intimate paintings of queer domestic life. He showed at the 2024 Venice Biennale and joined David Zwirner in February 2026.
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